Can Self-Exposure Be Private?

Moyra Davey, the photographer, filmmaker, and writer calls herself a “flâneuse who never leaves her apartment.” In “Les Goddesses,” her video included in the Whitney Biennial, she paces decisively around her home speaking into a microphone about subjects both scholastic and revealing—the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, her sister’s struggle with addiction—her tone even and remote. It’s a video that includes a long bibliography: she quotes wildly, almost promiscuously, referencing Louis Malle on reality, Roland Barthes on hashish, the poet Alejandra Piznarnik on food (“I cannot be happy if I am fat”), and then saying, “This comes close to summing up my adolescence.” It always comes back to her: the fifty-four-year-old, barefoot waif in a T-shirt and loose jeans, eclipsed by the light pouring in from the broad windows. Sometimes Davey interrupts her own erudite narration to shuffle through a series of photographs she took of her sisters in the nineteen-seventies.

“Why does everyone want to tell her their story?” Davey asks in “Les Goddesses.” Her subject matter might seem adamantly non-contemporary in its focus on nineteenth-century figures, but Davey’s philosophical interests are remarkably current. Her work explores the conflicting desires experienced by anyone with a Facebook account: to share while maintaining a degree of privacy. “Les Goddesses” is named for Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters (a family friend nicknamed them “the goddesses”), Fanny Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), and their stepsister Claire Claremont, all of whom were linked, romantically and tragically, to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Davey seeks out the connections between these sisters and her own, who are shown to us in photographs, angry, naked, and young. They look ready to gang up on a poorly behaved ex-boyfriend. Davey doesn’t detail the precise similarities between these two groups of sisters, but instead draws attention to loose coincidences: overlapping names (Davey’s own sister is named Claire); the reoccurrence of specific dates (Mary Wollstonecraft was born, Davey tells us, “two hundred years before my sister Claire was wet and dry”). These connections have a superstitious quality—they follow a code too internal to be logical.

Everyone, it seems, has a memoir to write; one wonders if there are any readers left or if they’re all too busy blogging. “Les Goddesses,” however, is a kind of elliptical self-portrait, contructed from a catalogue of what Davey reads. In one of her books, “The Problem of Reading,” which, like her video, falls somewhere between a critical study and a personal essay, Davey poses that “the most gratifying reading is the one that also entails the risk of producing a text of one’s own.” She believes, as Virginia Woolf wrote, that “the time to read poetry is when we are almost able to write it.” By turns, Davey is comforted and horrified by the isolation inherent to reading and writing. Even while she embeds herself in her apartment, she seeks ways of converting these activities into a public act. In her book, Davey asks, “What does it mean to spend a good part of one’s life alone in front a book? And if that is our choice, how are we to go about it?” Filming her working process is her answer.

By narrating her story through her favorite authors, Davey avoids the narcissistic pitfalls of autobiography. The apartment where most of the video is shot is cozy but sparse, with empty bookshelves and moving boxes strewn along the hallway. There’s no place to sit. Davey is not inviting the viewer for an intimate chat in her living room. The tone she sets is in line with catching a stranger on the subway reading your favorite book, inviting a connection both elusive and striking. By the end of the video, you’ve learned that Davey has multiple sclerosis and has a young son named Barney, who hates art museums. But it’s hard to discern how well you know her. She provides these facts off-handedly and there’s a sense that she’s leaving out as much, if not more, than she includes. There’s a naturalism to this approach that makes “Les Goddesses” appealing in a way that tell-all memoirs are not. Memoirs so often beg the question, Why would you want to tell me all this? For Davey, the clear answer is that sharing, in a calibrated and restrained way, is productive. She enjoys reading most when paired with writing. She can enjoy the solace of her apartment if she opens it up, on occasion, with a video camera. She made the film as much for herself as for us.

In her photographs, some of which are on display at the Biennial, Davey expertly plays with this tension between telling and not telling. Most of her work is done at home. She takes pictures of the envelopes and postage stamps of letters she sends. “Ebay pictures” is a collection of personal mementos captured in cold, white light. She shoots pennies and stereo equipment and renders these familiar objects eerie and disorienting. She uses her belongings like an index, and the effect is much like a table of contents without the succeeding chapters or anonymous monogram—you’re aware of layered meanings even if you don’t have access to them.

“Les Goddesses,” which is screening through Monday at the Murray Guy Gallery in Chelsea, ends with a twist: Davey leaves her house and shoots photographs of people who write while they ride the subway. They’re filling out checks and crossword puzzles, scribbling in notebooks, editing some kind of draft. Sometimes they defensively position their arms around their notebook so we can only see so much—an instinct that Davey can certainly understand.